


Girltalk

by westwingfanfictioncentral_archivist



Category: The West Wing
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2005-08-12
Updated: 2005-08-12
Packaged: 2019-05-15 15:21:28
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,716
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14792997
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/westwingfanfictioncentral_archivist/pseuds/westwingfanfictioncentral_archivist
Summary: Charlie talks to Will about women.





	Girltalk

**Author's Note:**

> A copy of this work was once archived at National Library, a part of the [ West Wing Fanfiction Central](https://fanlore.org/wiki/West_Wing_Fanfiction_Central), a West Wing fanfiction archive. More information about the Open Doors approved archive move can be found in the [announcement post](http://archiveofourown.org/admin_posts/8325).

**Girltalk**

**by: Delightfully Eccentric**

**Character(s):** Charlie, Will  
**Pairing(s):** Charlie/Will  
**Category(s):** Slash  
**Rating:** MATURE  
**Disclaimer:** The West Wing characters and histories aren't mine, and are used here for love, not money.  
**Summary:** Charlie talks to Will about women.   
**Spoiler:** Up to _Constituency of One_.  


Charlie talks to Will about women. 

Zoey, to begin with. He'd been talking about Zoey a lot since he first heard Jean- Paul's name, so he talked about her to the new guy too. It was something to say; it was a universal theme. 

Will offered advice. He was less likely to get into trouble talking about women than foreign policy, so he thought. He didn't seem to be thinking that this particular woman was the boss's daughter. When they talked about her, Charlie didn't think Will was thinking about Zoey at all. 

That should have been the first sign, that or the spark in his eye that spelt equal parts excitement and caution. That look probably came first - but Will looked that way at everything in the beginning. It became a sign when he started looking at Charlie a little *more* like that. 

Then Charlie began to push for stories of Will's women. They talked about women, then the signs glowed neon. 

In terms of significance, of chapters in their lives, it's been a long time since they were getting used to each other and talking about women. 

Charlie curls his fingers against the pillow, tenses his body, letting it slide over the sheets. He's naked, of course, but not to the eye. He can only see the thwarted hint of visibility where his outline meets the night. 

He doesn't know what Will's hiding from when he burrows under the covers, except that it's the same thing he's hiding of when he wants to do it with the lights out. Charlie always gets his way (about that). 

His eyes are drawn down and across, where Will, the light side of this relationship, shows up better than he. The man's modesty is frustrated by his turning in the night: his boxers, blushingly retrieved in the lamplight he always wants to dim, have worked their way down. Half his ass is exposed. Charlie's proprietorial finger traces it (only in his mind, which has squirreled away Will's shapes and textures, the sensations provoked just by stroking certain patches of his skin, stored for exactly these circumstances). A touch would rouse Will from wherever he is that's not here. 

Charlie knows Will dreams, for all his denials. A man like Will must. He doesn't know what he dreams of. He'll find out. It might take longer than it seemed to take to find Zoey. (He hopes it's a better place.) 

Zoey was gone two days and two hours (until the first heroes found her, four hours until he saw her safe, parts of her safe). It felt like - that first night stretching into broken morning after the blue panic erupted around him and Josh (who, he once thought, might have lain in Will's place, but he was thinking of nothing like that then). That night, it seemed like he hadn't seen her in long aching years, stretching back to the days when he talked to her about how boyfriends should behave, when at least one of them was innocent. 

Now she's been away at the farm... months, it must be. He adds, subtracts, gives up. He's hardly noticed. He doesn't know what his distraction means. 

When they speak he's reminded, oddly, of those first conversations with Will, revolving around her and Will's possibly existent girlfriends. It's about trying to think of things to say. He wonders if he talks to her about Will more than he talks about Josh, CJ. He wonders if she's still whole enough to notice that sometimes, when he begins another Will story, he catches himself halfway through and tells her he meant Toby instead. 

His reasons for this thing with Will started to change after what happened to Zoey. He hardly noticed at the time but he knows now that what they're doing isn't the same as what they were doing six months ago. If he were going to think of events in terms of fortune, he supposes he should consider himself lucky Will's still here. 

Too vivid, the discomfort and the conversation after Will sat with Charlie, who was sitting with Zoey, and asked how she was feeling so he could put lies in her mouth. Maybe Will thought they were true. For all Charlie talked to Will and mentioned her name, he never said anything that would help Will know Zoey at all. 

It was after, a long day after, after a long day. After the fireworks, the slump. The corridors were quiet. Most of the staff had slunk home. Everyone wanted escape except Zoey, who wanted to fight, but she and her mother were the only ones with anywhere to run to. 

It's doing her good, but there's a part of Charlie that wonders if he orchestrated her retreat to free himself from the need to worry for her. Charlie swallows that part (like he swallows the voice that asked his mother to change shifts). 

A quite different voice grunted in response to Will's presence at the end of that day, when Abbey and her daughter had packed and fled, the father was mourning in the Residence and the rest of the staff had crawled under their rocks. Will could have been gone hours ago. 

(Will could have been gone months ago. Charlie wouldn't have kept coming back if Will had kept talking about his ex when Charlie's mouth was on his cock. Well. Charlie might have, but he's damned if he knows why Will did.) 

Will wasn't gone. He wasn't going home until he had a sign he was welcome to go home with Charlie. Or a sign to the contrary: Will never pushes the point. There are shades that make Charlie seem the older man (remnants of the interesting times he's lived through). 

It was something of a crucial moment: Charlie's last chance to step away from the girl whose name has dropped from his lips thrice as often as Will's has, even in bed. 

Will didn't play it like that. "She's- She's-" 

He knew how he would sound and kept at it anyway. 

The *anyway* is one of the things Charlie appreciates in Will. It took months for him to get over worrying the staff would laugh every time he opened his mouth but he spoke his mind anyway. He walks like he mistrusts the carpet not to turn to hot coals but he's fast and he's surefooted and he's standing right beside Charlie when he's least expected. 

"The worst is over. She seems like a tough girl." 

Will didn't understand the curl of Charlie's lip, nor the dry chuckle. She probably did seem tough, to him. It used to grate on Charlie, how his last fuck was harder than her whole life. She thought being photographed was suffering. Now it's true. There's ache in her every moment and flashbulbs torch the flare. Charlie's tired of the damage written on the people in his life and he's weary of aching for them. 

He rolls the whites of his eyes, the only thing in the room paler than Will's skin. His thing with Will used to be joking, talking like uncommonly gentlemanly frat boys, playing Zoey's courtly lover. Inventing women to tell Charlie about was Will's diversion from becoming known. 

Charlie's darker than a diversion these days. Will isn't like Zoey was - but he's closer to that than he is to how they've all become. He's lucky Will isn't gone. 

The afternoon he heard - through the crashing and blazing of a Toby who was pissed about a lot more than this - that Will was changing horses in midstream, he wondered if it might have something to do with him. A question of distance, either in appearance or actuality. Will wasn't the spark to the flame of Charlie's self- importance, but he's more combustible than he first appears. 

Probably Will would have liked to tell him himself: he's the sort of man who takes these details seriously. Probably he gently prodded Toby for information on who'd been told, probably took a sound verbal lashing for it. Maybe something got broke. 

Charlie's pretty sure Will already knew he knew before the call: "Okay if I come over?" 

It didn't change anything. Charlie isn't sure why he thought it might. Funnily enough, it doesn't wound his ego at all to acknowledge that Will's decisions are based on considerations entirely unrelated to shower-wanks and girltalk. 

Charlie's palm inches closer to Will's shoulder, hovers at the point close enough to sense warmth and touches, barely, against the skin. The sensation is conquest. The means is self-control. He presses the pad of each finger down one by one; his palm tightens, and he has a solid grip. Will lies more peaceful than anything Charlie's seen in a long time. 

He increases the pressure just enough to roll the body next to him. His weight makes the sheet slip over skin, unveiling a monument to clean-living and safe-keeping. Every time Charlie touches this body, he wonders what it's like to live unblemished. He suspects Will couldn't tell him even if he asked. Both the illusion of perfection and the shadows barely visible through it keep him coming back. 

When he does, Will is never gone. 

Charlie blinks and when his eyes are open so are Will's. It would be in vain to guess how long his attentions have been felt. It would be in vain to try to read the eyes so obviously digesting every thought on his face. 

"Hey," he says, smiling as if he was born to it. He can't pinpoint what changes in Will's face but it certainly expresses pleasure as he fumbles for his glasses. It's a nice try, but they both know he can see into Charlie fine without them. 

Charlie props himself up on his elbow, feasts his eyes instead on something they both know he's seen before. 

"So." His other hand hovers, undecided as to whereabouts on Will's nudity it's going to come to rest. "Tell me again about your last girlfriend?" 


End file.
